Around The Tea-Table eBook

Alas for the boys in town! Easter comes to them
on stilts, and they buy their eggs out of the store.
There is no room for a boy to swing round. There
is no good place in town to fly a kite, or trundle
a hoop, or even shout without people’s throwing
up the window to see who is killed. The holidays
are robbed of half their life because some wiseacre
will persist in telling him who Santa Claus is, while
yet he is hanging up his first pair of stockings.
Here the boy pays half a dollar for a bottle of perfume
as big as his finger, when out of town, for nothing
but the trouble of breathing it, he may smell a country
full of new-mown hay and wild honeysuckle. In
a painted bath-tub he takes his Saturday bath careful
lest he hit his head against the spigot, while in
the meadow-brook the boys plunge in wild glee, and
pluck up health and long life from the pebbly bottom.
Oh, the joy in the spring day, when, after long teasing
of mother to let you take off your shoes, you dash
out on the cool grass barefoot, or down the road,
the dust curling about the instep in warm enjoyment,
and, henceforth, for months, there shall be no shoes
to tie or blacken.

Let us send the boys out into the country every year
for an airing. If their grandfather and grandmother
be yet alive, they will give them a good time.
They will learn in a little while the mysteries of
the hay-mow, how to drive oxen and how to keep Easter.
They will take the old people back to the time when
you yourself were a boy. There will be for the
grandson an extra cake in each oven. And grandfather
and grandmother will sit and watch the prodigy, and
wonder if any other family ever had such grandchildren.
It will be a good thing when the evenings are short,
and the old folks’ eyesight is somewhat dim,
if you can set up in their house for a little while
one or two of these lights of childhood. For the
time the aches and pains of old age will be gone,
and they will feel as lithe and merry as when sixty
years ago they themselves rummaged hayrick, and mow
and wagon-house, hiding eggs for Easter.

CHAPTER XLII.

Sinkorswim.

We entered the ministry with a mortal horror of extemporaneous
speaking. Each week we wrote two sermons and
a lecture all out, from the text to the amen.
We did not dare to give out the notice of a prayer-meeting
unless it was on paper. We were a slave to manuscript,
and the chains were galling; and three months more
of such work would have put us in the graveyard.
We resolved on emancipation. The Sunday night
was approaching when we expected to make violent rebellion
against this bondage of pen and paper. We had
an essay about ten minutes long on some Christian
subject, which we proposed to preach as an introduction
to the sermon, resolved, at the close of that brief
composition, to launch out on the great sea of extemporaneousness.